Paradise (17 page)

There were two hours and twenty minutes before Seneca’s bus departed, so she wondered if she should spend it at one of the movies she’d passed.
Serpico, The Exorcist, The Sting,
were the hot choices, but it felt like betrayal to see any one of them without Eddie’s arm around her shoulder. Thinking of his predicament and her bumbling efforts to help him, Seneca sighed heavily, but there was no danger of tears. She had not shed one even when she found Jean’s letter next to the Lorna Doones. Well cared for, loved, perhaps, by the mothers in both of the foster homes, she knew it was not her self that the mothers had approved of but the fact that she took reprimand quietly, ate what given, shared what she had and never ever cried.

The ginger ale was rattling through the straw when the chauffeur stood before her and smiled.

“Excuse me, miss. May I speak to you for a moment?”

“Sure. I mean. Sure.” Seneca scooted over to make room on the bench, but he did not sit down.

“I’m authorized to offer you five hundred dollars for some complicated but quite easy work, if you’re interested.”

Seneca opened her mouth to say: complicated
and
easy? His eyes were cloudy gray and the buttons on his uniform glimmered like ancient gold.

“Oh, no. Thanks, but I’m on my way out of here,” she said. “My bus leaves in two hours.”

“I understand. But the work won’t take long. Perhaps if you’d talk to my employer—she’s right outside—she can describe it to you. Unless, of course, you have to be somewhere in a hurry?”

“She?”

“Yes. Mrs. Fox. Step this way. It’ll take just a minute.”

A limousine throbbed under bright streetlights a few yards from the station entrance. When the chauffeur opened the door, the head of a very pretty woman turned toward Seneca.

“Hello. I’m Norma. Norma Keene Fox. I’m looking for some help.” She didn’t hold out her hand, but her smile made Seneca want her to. “Can I talk to you about it?”

The white linen blouse she wore was sleeveless, cut low. Her beige skirt was long. When she uncrossed her legs, Seneca saw bright sandals, coral-painted toenails. Champagne-colored hair rushed back behind ears with no earrings.

“What kind of help?” Seneca asked.

“Come inside so I can explain. It’s hard talking through an open car door.”

Seneca hesitated.

Mrs. Fox’s laugh was a warm tumble of bells. “It’s okay, dear. You don’t have to take the job if you don’t want it.”

“I didn’t say I didn’t.”

“Well, then. Come. It’s cooler in here.”

The door click was soft but profound and Mrs. Fox’s Bal à Versailles was irresistible.

Something confidential, she said. Nothing illegal, of course, just private. You type? A little? I want somebody not from around here. I hope five hundred is enough. I could go a little higher for a really intelligent girl. David will drive you back to the bus station, even if you decide not to take the job.

Only then did Seneca realize the limousine was no longer parked. The interior lights were still on. The air was cooled. The limousine floated.

This is a lovely part of the world, Norma continued. But narrow-minded, if you know what I mean. Still, I wouldn’t live anywhere else. My husband doesn’t believe me, neither do my friends, because I’m from back East. When I go back there, they say
Wichita?
Like that. But I love it here. Where are you from? I thought so. They don’t wear jeans like that around here. They should, though, if they’ve got the bottom, I mean. Like you do. Yes. My son’s at Rice. Lots of people work for us, but it’s only when Leon is away—that’s my husband—that I can get anything accomplished. That’s where you come in, if you agree, I mean. Married? Well, what I need done only an intelligent female can do. You don’t wear lipstick, do you? Good. Your lips are lovely like that. I told David, find an intelligent girl, please. No farmgirls. No dairy queens. He’s very good. He found you. Our place is out of town a ways. No, thank you. I can’t digest peanuts. Oh dear, you must be starving. We’ll have a very good supper and I’ll explain what I want done. Really simple if you can follow directions. It’s confidential work so I prefer to hire a stranger rather than someone local. Are those your own lashes? Gracious. David? Do you know if Mattie cooked a real supper tonight? No fish, I hope, or do you like fish? Trout’s wonderful in Kansas. I think some chicken, fried, might do the trick. We have beautifully fed poultry here—they eat better than most people do. No, don’t put them away. Give them to me. Who knows? They might come in handy.

Seneca spent the following three weeks in gorgeous rooms, with gorgeous Norma and food too pretty to eat. Norma called her many sweet things but not once asked what her name was. The front door was never locked and she could leave anytime she wanted to. She didn’t have to stay there, moving from peacock feathers to abject humiliation; from coddling to playful abuse; from caviar tartlets to filth. But the pain framed the pleasure, gave it edge. The humiliation made surrender deep, tender. Long-lasting.

When Leon Fox telephoned his imminent return, Norma gave her the five hundred dollars and some clothes, including a cashmere serape. As promised, David drove her to the bus station, his buttons extra gleamy in the sunlight. They did not speak during the drive.

Seneca wandered Wichita for hours, stopping in a coffee shop, resting in a city park. At a loss as to where to go or what to do. Get a job near the prison and stand by him? Meaning follow his instructions, apologize for not getting his mother’s savings. Go back to Chicago? Pick up her life-before-Eddie? Instant friends. Catch-quick jobs. Temporary housing. Stolen food. Eddie Turtle had been settled life to her for six months, and now he was gone. Or should she just move on? The chauffeur had picked her up for Norma like a stray puppy. No, not even that. But like a pet you wanted to play with for a while—a little while—but not keep. Not love. Not name it. Just feed it, play with it, then return it to its own habitat. She had five hundred dollars, and other than Eddie, no one knew where she was. Maybe she ought to keep it that way.

Seneca hadn’t decided much of anything when she saw the first place to hide—a flatbed loaded with cement sacks. When she was discovered the driver held her against a tire, splicing his questions, curses and threats with mild flirtations. Seneca said nothing at first, then suddenly begged permission to go to the bathroom. “I have to go. Bad,” she said. The driver sighed and released her, shouting a final warning at her back. She hitched a few times after that but so disliked the necessary talk she accepted the risk of stowing away in trucks. She preferred traveling resolutely nowhere, closed off from society, hidden among quiet cargo—no one knowing she was there. When she found herself among crates in a brand-new ’73 pickup, jumping out of it to follow a coatless woman was the first pointedly uninstructed thing she had ever done.

The sobbing—or was she giggling?—woman was gone now. The snow had stopped. Downstairs, someone was calling her name.

“Seneca? Seneca? Come on, baby. We’re waiting for you.”

DIVINE

“L
et me tell you about love, that silly word you believe is about whether you like somebody or whether somebody likes you or whether you can put up with somebody in order to get something or someplace you want or you believe it has to do with how your body responds to another body like robins or bison or maybe you believe love is how forces or nature or luck is benign to you in particular not maiming or killing you but if so doing it for your own good.

“Love is none of that. There is nothing in nature like it. Not in robins or bison or in the banging tails of your hunting dogs and not in blossoms or suckling foal. Love is divine only and difficult always. If you think it is easy you are a fool. If you think it is natural you are blind. It is a learned application without reason or motive except that it is God.

“You do not deserve love regardless of the suffering you have endured. You do not deserve love because somebody did you wrong. You do not deserve love just because you want it. You can only earn—by practice and careful contemplation—the right to express it and you have to learn how to accept it. Which is to say you have to earn God. You have to practice God. You have to think God—carefully. And if you are a good and diligent student you may secure the right to show love. Love is not a gift. It is a diploma. A diploma conferring certain privileges: the privilege of expressing love and the privilege of receiving it.

“How do you know you have graduated? You don’t. What you do know is that you are human and therefore educable, and therefore capable of learning how to learn, and therefore interesting to God, who is interested only in Himself which is to say He is interested only in love. Do you understand me? God is not interested in you. He is interested in love and the bliss it brings to those who understand and share that interest.

“Couples that enter the sacrament of marriage and are not prepared to go the distance or are not willing to get right with the real love of God cannot thrive. They may cleave together like robins or gulls or anything else that mates for life. But if they eschew this mighty course, at the moment when all are judged for the disposition of their eternal lives, their cleaving won’t mean a thing. God bless the pure and holy. Amen.”

Some of the amens that accompanied and followed Reverend Senior Pulliam’s words were loud, others withholding; some people did not open their mouths at all. The question, thought Anna, was not why but who. Who was Pulliam blasting? Was he directing his remarks to the young people, warning them to shape up their selfish lives? Or was he aiming at their parents for allowing the juvenile restlessness and defiance that had been rankling him even before that fist appeared on the Oven? Most likely, she thought, he was bringing the weight of his large and long Methodist education to bear down on Richard. A stone to crush his colleague’s message of God as a permanent interior engine that, once ignited, roared, purred and moved you to do your own work as well as His—but, if idle, rusted, immobilizing the soul like a frozen clutch.

That must be it, she thought. Pulliam was targeting Misner. Because surely he would not stand before the bride and groom—a guest preacher asked to make a few (few!) remarks before the ceremony to a congregation made up of almost everybody in Ruby, only a third of whom were members of Pulliam’s church—and frighten them to death on their wedding day. Because surely he would not insult the bride’s mother and sister-in-law, who wore like a coat the melancholy of tending broken babies and who not only had not chastised God for that knockout blow to everything they dreamed of but seemed to increase in steadfastness as each year passed. And although the groom had no living parents, surely Pulliam did not intend to embarrass his aunts—to put the feet of those devout women to the fire for caring (too much, perhaps?) for the sole “son” the family would ever have, now that Soane’s boys were dead, Dovey having had none, and not allowing mourning for either of those losses to tear them up or close their hearts. Surely not. And surely Pulliam was not trying to rile the groom’s uncles, Deacon and Steward, who behaved as if God were their silent business partner. Pulliam had always seemed to admire them, hinting repeatedly that they belonged in Zion, not Calvary, where they had to listen to the namby-pamby sermons of a man who thought teaching was letting children talk as if they had something important to say that the world had not heard and dealt with already.

Who else would feel the sting of “God is not interested in you.” Or wince from the burn in “if you think love is natural you are blind.” Who else but Richard Misner who now had to stand up and preside, over the most anticipated wedding anyone could remember, under the boiling breath of Senior “Take No Prisoners” Pulliam? Unless, of course, he was talking to her, telling her: Cleave unto another if you want, but if you are not cleaving to God (Pulliam’s God, that is) your marriage will not be worth the license. Because he knew she and Richard were talking marriage, and he knew she helped him organize the young disobedients. “Be the Furrow.”

Rogue mint overwhelmed the flower arrangements around the altar. Clumps of it, along with a phlox called wild sweet william, grew beneath the church windows that at eleven o’clock were opened to a climbing sun. The light falling from the April sky was a gift. Inside the church the maplewood pews, burnished to a military glow, set off the spring-white walls, the understated pulpit, the comfortable almost picket-fence look of the railing, where communicants could kneel to welcome the spirit one more time. Above the altar, high into its clean, clear space, hung a three-foot oak cross. Uncluttered. Unencumbered. No gold competed with its perfection or troubled its poise. No writhe or swoon of the body of Christ bloated its lyric thunder.

The women of Ruby did not powder their faces and they wore no harlot’s perfume. So the voluptuous odor of mint and sweet william disturbed the congregation, made it reel in anticipation of a good time with plenty good food at Soane Morgan’s house. There would be music by anyone: July on the upright piano; the Male Chorus; a Kate Golightly solo; the Holy Redeemer Quartet; a dreamy-eyed boy named Brood on the steps with a mouth organ. There would be the press of good clothing; silk dresses and starched shirts forgotten as folks leaned against trees, sat on the grass, mishandled second helpings of cream peas. There would be the shouts of sugar-drunk children; the crackle of wedding gift paper snatched from the floor and folded so neatly it seemed more valuable than the gift it had enclosed. Farmers, ranchers and wheat-growing women would let themselves be yanked from chairs and clapped into repeating dance steps from long ago. Teenagers would laugh and blink their eyes in an effort to hide their want.

But more than joy and children high on wedding cake, they were looking forward to the union of two families and an end to the animus that had soaked the members and friends of those families for four years. Animus that centered on the maybe-baby the bride had not acknowledged, announced or delivered.

Now they sat, as did Anna Flood, wondering what on earth Reverend Pulliam thought he was doing. Why cast a pall now? Why diminish the odor of rogue mint and phlox; blunt the taste of the roast lamb and lemon pies awaiting them. Why fray the harmony, derail the peace this marriage brought?

Richard Misner rose from his seat. Annoyed; no, angry. So angry he could not look at his fellow preacher and let him see how deep the cut. Throughout Pulliam’s remarks he had gazed expressionless at the Easter hats of the women in the pews. Earlier that morning he had planned five or six opening sentences to launch the sacred rite of matrimony, crafted them carefully around Revelation 19:7,9, sharpening the “marriage supper of the Lamb” image, coring it to reveal the reconciliation this wedding promised. He had segued from Revelation to Matthew 19:6, “Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh,” to seal not only the couple’s fidelity to each other but the renewed responsibilities of all Morgans and Fleetwoods.

Now he looked at the couple standing patiently before the altar and wondered whether they had understood or even heard what had been laid on them. He, however, did understand. Knew this lethal view of his chosen work was a deliberate assault on all he believed. Suddenly he understood and shared Augustine’s rage at the “proud minister” whom he ranked with the devil. Augustine had gone on to say that God’s message was not corrupted by the messenger; “if [the light] should pass through defiled beings, it is not itself defiled.” Although Augustine had not met Senior Pulliam, he must have known ministers like him. But his dismissal of them to Satan’s company did not acknowledge the damage words spoken from a pulpit could wreak. What would Augustine say as anodyne to the poison Pulliam had just sprayed over everything? Over the heads of men finding it so hard to fight their instincts to control what they could and crunch what they could not; in the hearts of women tirelessly taming the predator; in the faces of children not yet recovered from the blow to their esteem upon learning that adults would not regard them as humans until they mated; of the bride and groom frozen there, desperate for this public bonding to dilute their private shame. Misner knew that Pulliam’s words were a widening of the war he had declared on Misner’s activities: tempting the young to step outside the wall, outside the town limits, shepherding them, forcing them to transgress, to think of themselves as civil warriors. He knew also that a public secret about a never-born baby poked through the grounds of the quarrel like a fang.

Suitable language came to mind but, not trusting himself to deliver it without revealing his deep personal hurt, Misner walked away from the pulpit, to the rear wall of the church. There he stretched, reaching up until he was able to unhook the cross that hung there. He carried it then, past the empty choir stall, past the organ where Kate sat, the chair where Pulliam was, on to the podium and held it before him for all to see—if only they would. See what was certainly the first sign any human anywhere had made: the vertical line; the horizontal one. Even as children, they drew it with their fingers in snow, sand or mud; they laid it down as sticks in dirt; arranged it from bones on frozen tundra and broad savannas; as pebbles on riverbanks; scratched it on cave walls and outcroppings from Nome to South Africa. Algonquin and Laplanders, Zulu and Druids—all had a finger memory of this original mark. The circle was not first, nor was the parallel or the triangle. It was this mark, this, that lay underneath every other. This mark, rendered in the placement of facial features. This mark of a standing human figure poised to embrace. Remove it, as Pulliam had done, and Christianity was like any and every religion in the world: a population of supplicants begging respite from begrudging authority; harried believers ducking fate or dodging everyday evil; the weak negotiating a doomed trek through the wilderness; the sighted ripped of light and thrown into the perpetual dark of choicelessness. Without this sign, the believer’s life was confined to praising God and taking the hits. The praise was credit; the hits were interest due on a debt that could never be paid. Or, as Pulliam put it, no one knew when he had “graduated.” But with it, in the religion in which this sign was paramount and foundational, well, life was a whole other matter.

See? The execution of this one solitary black man propped up on these two intersecting lines to which he was attached in a parody of human embrace, fastened to two big sticks that were so convenient, so recognizable, so embedded in consciousness
as consciousness,
being both ordinary and sublime. See? His woolly head alternately rising on his neck and falling toward his chest, the glow of his midnight skin dimmed by dust, streaked by gall, fouled by spit and urine, gone pewter in the hot, dry wind and, finally, as the sun dimmed in shame, as his flesh matched the odd lessening of afternoon light as though it were evening, always sudden in that climate, swallowing him and the other death row felons, and the silhouette of this original sign merged with a false night sky. See how this official murder out of hundreds marked the difference; moved the relationship between God and man from CEO and supplicant to one on one? The cross he held was abstract; the absent body was real, but both combined to pull humans from backstage to the spotlight, from muttering in the wings to the principal role in the story of their lives. This execution made it possible to respect—freely, not in fear—one’s self and one another. Which was what love was: unmotivated respect. All of which testified not to a peevish Lord who was His own love but to one who enabled human love. Not for His own glory—never. God loved the way humans loved one another; loved the way humans loved themselves; loved the genius on the cross who managed to do both and die knowing it.

But Richard Misner could not speak calmly of these things. So he stood there and let the minutes tick by as he held the crossed oak in his hands, urging it to say what he could not: that not only is God interested in you; He
is
you.

Would they see? Would they?

For those who could see it, the groom’s face was a study. He looked up at the cross Reverend Misner was holding holding holding. Saying nothing, just holding it there in locked time while the unendurable silence was sprinkled with coughs and soft, encouraging grunts. People were already nervous about his wedding because buzzards had been seen flying north over the town. The question in their minds was whether that was an omen for harm (they circled the town) or for good (none landed). Simpletons, he thought. If this marriage was doomed, it had nothing to do with birds.

Suddenly the open windows were not enough. The groom began to perspire in his beautifully cut black suit. Anger shot through him like a .32. Why was everybody using his wedding, messing up his ceremony, to extend a quarrel he could care less about? He wanted it over. Over and done with so his uncles would shut up; so Jeff and Fleet would stop spreading lies about him, so he could take his place among the married and propertied men of Ruby, so he could burn all those letters from Arnette. But especially so he could flush that Gigi bitch out of his life completely. Like sugar turning from unreasonable delight to the body’s mortal enemy, his craving for her had poisoned him, rendered him diabetic, stupid, helpless. Following months of risky sweetness, she had become indifferent, bored, even hateful. In tall corn he had waited for her; in moonlight he had crept behind henhouses to meet her; spent money that was not his to entertain her; lied to get something other than a truck to drive her; planted a marijuana crop for her; carried ice in August heat to cool the inside of her thighs; bought her a battery-powered radio she adored, a chenille robe she laughed at. Most of all he had loved her for years, an aching, humiliating, self-loathing love that drifted from pining to stealth.